Great things take time. Email marketing campaigns are no exception. Successful transitions from marketing to sales involve giving your leads some TLC.

Easier said than done. Let’s break it down.

Nurturing Your Leads: It’s All About Perspective

We discussed leads in last week’s blog, and these are what you will be working with carefully from this point forward. Not all leads are created equal, but all have equal potential. Overestimating or discrediting leads based on assumptions is dangerous. For small businesses, lead generation can be a daunting task, and after finally accumulating a hefty list of leads, it may be tempting to jump to conclusions, either rushing the sales process or dismissing some leads as unworthy. Expert reports reveal that 65% of business-to-business marketers have not established nurturing campaign strategies, and this tendency towards presumption is probably why.
Leads that may seem cold at first could heat up in 3 to 6 months time with carefully catered strategies. None should be tossed aside; instead, view each one as a seed of intrinsic value that you can nurture to sprout into a sales-ready lead. There is no set limit to the sales potential of your existing contact list, regardless of any assumptions you may have. If you take the time to build relationships, you could convert even the most distant lead to a loyal client. Yes, this may seem like a frustrating waste of time in some cases, but overcoming this assumption could be what sets you apart from the other businesses cluttering this contact’s inbox. Within each lead lies potential value for your business, and to access this value you must tread patiently, because who would follow a total stranger?

 

Segmenting Your Email Marketing Campaign

Blasting the same general message to everyone on your list will not make them feel comfortable with you. It will just alienate you as a faceless, soulless predator that has no concern for the well-being of its clients. Studies show that more than 70% of leads are not sales-ready. How do you make someone you barely know feel special? Start by considering the small amount you do know about them, and identifying their differences. These variations could be in industry, target market, specific needs, or any significant history of their business. How did they sign up? Have they taken any actions since they opted in? Even a lack of action tells you something unique about this lead. This information lays the foundation for your segmented campaigns.
With segmented groups, even if the basic content of your emails are the same, the framework of each segment’s emails can be personalized with slight modifications to subject lines and introductions.

This way, you can effectively show your array of leads that you care about their individual needs.

To consistently nurture your leads, you will need a stable backlog of content to draw from regularly–be it once a month, twice a month, once a week–again, these frequencies depend on the nature of your business and the stage of each B2B relationship. But what if you want to get started now? How are you supposed to bust out an old library of valuable content so fast? Never fear, there are plenty of ways to repurpose existing content while you work on building new material.

 

Quality content can be found in many places easily, such as:

  • customer reviews, test group findings, successful reports
  • updates and news about your company
  • special offers, giveaways, promotions
  • social media influencers’ posts
  • others’ publications on why your product or service is necessary for success
  • others’ relevant podcasts, articles and videos that your audience will find useful

 

Nurture Leads By Repurposing Existing Content

  • divide any existing publications (such as whitepapers) into many smaller sections of content, and send these sections individually in separate emails
  • record live events and use the videos as content
  • transcribe events into written content for blog posts
  • respond to online influencers
  • summarize other relevant blog posts and link back to them
  • create infographic representations of existing content

 

Further down the road, monitor your leads’ behaviors, including open rates, click-throughs, and whitepaper and webinar downloads.

This steady flow of quality, useful content between “Welcome!” and “Buy Now!” bridges the distance between a cold lead and a relationship of familiarity and trust. If you take time both creating content and distributing it, your nurture campaign will flow naturally.